Amazon still rules!

Since the death of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos is starting to appear more frequently on magazine covers. I still have the Time magazine edition with Bezos as person of the year from December 1999. I remember those clever Dot Com commercials Amazon did in 1997, 98, 99. They were a startup in the hole – in a big way.

They were losing money like crazy but Mr. Bezos just kept on smiling. He didn’t care because he had a vision and the ‘stick-to-itiveness’ that most of us lack. He knew that building up a faithful user-base would take time and they would lose money but it was all part of the plan. Those were the days.

They aren’t in the hole anymore. They have an e-commerce intelligence (machine learning) and basically invented personalization for online shoppers. It’s pretty hard to beat the king.  I’ve used Amazon as a shining example of usability many times. I look to it for how a website should communicate with customers. Still, here we are in 2012 and most websites and apps still can’t get user messaging right.

It’s about three things: service, selection and services!

• Give a consumer the service and they will buy a product from you.
• Give them the selection and make it easy for them to choose and they will buy a product from you.
• Give them some services to expand their activity on your application and return more often and they will buy a product from you.

Amazon is NOT paying me to say this. I can honestly tell you, every time I see someone receive a package from Amazon, they say the same thing before they open it, “I love Amazon”.

They’ve simply done it right.